Abraham
Lincoln (1809-1865) was the 16th President of the United States of America.

He
was assassinated at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, a Good Friday. Well-known
stage actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot
Lincoln, did not know that Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army of
Northern Virginia, had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant a few days earlier,
precipitating the end of the Civil War.

Booth's
father was curiously named Junius Brutus, after Marcus Junius Brutus, one of Julius Caesar's assassins.
When you look back, all these little nothings appear as omens, don't they?

Lincoln
was the first American President to be assassinated. His handsome, 26-year-old
assassin would be found in hiding and killed 12 days later. However, Lincoln's
extraordinary death does not define him.

He
was born on Sinking Spring Farm, Hardin County, KY (the historical Hardin
County now forms part of LaRue County). Sinking Spring cost Lincoln's father
Thomas 118 English pounds, or $575. That would have been $8484 in 2011 dollars,
which doesn't sound like much for a property that included a family dwelling, a
handful of outbuildings and a good water source.

Abraham
lost his mother at the age of nine. No-one's quite sure what took Nancy Lincoln;
it was either milk sickness, brought on by drinking
milk from cows that had ingested white snakeroot, or it was tuberculosis.[2]
One year after Nancy's death, Thomas Lincoln married a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, who
treated Abraham with affection and encouraged him to read and improve himself.
Abraham would support Sarah until the end of her life, growing closer to Sarah over
the years than to his own father. Thomas was not a man of learning, despite his
onetime success and good standing in the county.

Thomas
and Nancy Lincoln were Separate Baptists, an offshoot of the First Baptists
that opposed alcohol, dancing and slavery. The Lincolns moved north across the
Ohio river to free territory, ostensibly on account of slavery, although the
weightier motive, as Abraham once remarked, must have been his father's losses.

One
Denton Offut gave Lincoln his first adult job ferrying goods by flatboat. At
the end of a three-month journey, Abe arrived in New Orleans, where he
witnessed slavery in action. It was Spring. He walked home.

Flatboats in New Orleans, 1873Woodcut by A Measom Jr.

So,
what can Abraham Lincoln teach you about writing a story, novel or play?

"Don't worry when you are not
recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition."

Pop
culture has put the word "awesome" on a pedestal for good reason.
Everybody I meet wants

a)
to be awed.

b)
to be awesome.

a)
doesn't require much effort on your part. Just buy a movie ticket and go see a
movie that changes the way you think or shows you things you never thought
possible. Or find a restaurant where the goulash is so good that a spoonful has
the power to make you remember half a dozen past lives.

b)
that's where the sweat of your brow comes in. I was going to say "creative
abilities" as well, and surely they count, but. There is a "but." I'll tell you what I'm thinking: A written
page is worth a thousand words cloistered in your mind. Ten draft pages beat
five eulogies lost in a poem's dream.

The current definition of awesome: Promotional poster for the upcoming monster-brawl movie, Pacific Rim.

Ideas without execution don't get you
very far.
Now let me share a mysterious perception that's been taking hold in my mind --
it seems that if you execute plenty and often, and stop worrying too much about your
inadequacies, the ideas will take
notice and find their way into everything you do. Eventually.

You
can go with minimalism, maximalism or find an artistic approach that
works for you — so long as you get to that particular place where the light of
truth shines so hard and raw that you
can't help telling yourself, "This is it. I found my true North."
Then comes the hard part, navigating without a compass. You just have to do
what they did in the olden days and follow your stars.

Two
things outlast the ages: stone tombs, and the words you leave behind.

"Give me six hours to chop down
a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

In
many ways, outlining a novel is like playing chess. You have to think several
moves ahead and your plays need to make sense. Consider this: Would anyone
sacrifice a queen to capture a pawn? Do you suddenly declare your bishops can
move sideways as well as diagonally?

(If
so, I must ask: Are you five-years-old?[3])

Long-form
writing needs preparation. I should know. I tried it three times and three times I gave
up because I hadn't bothered to come up with a solid outline, not even the bare
bones of it. All I had were some vague ideas about protagonist, antagonist and
setting. Geniuses like E. L. Doctorow or William Gibson can pants it if they
like.[4] It doesn't work for me and probably won't work for you.

Working
from a detailed outline may not be the intrinsically superior method. However:

I'd
say you have to know enough about your
story world to feel at home in it.

Not
so much that you end up killing all the narrative possibilities at your
disposal, though. To be clear, it's 101% OK to write exploratory drafts. It's
fun! New ideas crop up as you make room for the unexpected, new and much-needed
characters emerge from the fictive mass, new
problems and strategies present themselves. Just like in a game of chess.

The
chessboard is a matrix for countless plays and permutations. Without the chessboard, your chess bricks
are meaningless. Without an outline of some kind, there's no telling where
your story should go. You can't decide
what to get out of your story because there are no boundaries. And a story
needs them.

The mystery, magic and wonder of the novel is that you have to sharpen the ax, fell the tree, cut a board out of it, polish it, paint the pattern, create the pieces, define the rules... And only after all that gratifying work does the labor of storytelling begin.

From the "awesome" Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)...

... to Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal in Lincoln (also 2012). Two conceptions of spectacle, two modesof storytelling. One for complete idiots, another for people who like painstaking - if sentimental -renditions of times past.

Neither one perfect in any measure of the word, both movies stand as symbols of Abraham Lincoln'sability to inspire.

FOOTNOTES

[1]
I absolutely must refer you to sharpwriter's other masterpiece, the mecha-Roosevelt.
The French invented the word nonpareil
to praise delectable works of this nature.

[4]
Doctorow writes beautifully, but his ideas are sometimes wafer-thin; Gibson has
come up with intriguing, premonitory notions of life in the information age,
but his diction lacks a certain grace. I can't help but think — what if they
spent a little more time planning and a little less just exploring? Their work often reads like half-polished drafts. ...I
use the word geniuses without irony.
I may not like what they do but I respect their body of work.

P.S.: By "stop worrying too much about your inadequacies," I don't mean anything like "don't try to improve" or "be content with average."